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Can you see your QMgr for the trees?

When you have a lot of queue managers to manage, if you’re not careful it can get to point where you can’t see the wood for the trees. Where’s that queue manager I’m after/need to make a change to/have just been phoned about?

MO71 is capable of managing hundreds of queue managers, but you don’t have to spend your time scrolling down a very long list of queue managers looking for the one you want. There are several ways that MO71 allows you to organize your queue managers.

MO71 Main Window showing Grouped QMgrs

Grouping

The main window of MO71 shows all your queue managers, and to arrange that otherwise long list, you can organize your queue managers into groups. A group name is set in the location dialog, along with the queue manager name and connection details (see the screenshot below).

Set the Group name during import

You can also choose a group name when you import queue managers from the local machine, from a CCDT, or from MQ Explorer allowing your newly imported queue managers to be immediately placed in an appropriate group.

Network Names

MO71 Network View with one network selected

In addition to putting a queue manager in a group, you can also put each queue manager into one, or many, networks. Networks are other groupings of queue managers and can be anything you like, but some examples include by platform; by environment, for example, Devt, Test, QA, Production; or by application group. Clearly these would all overlap, you could have a Windows queue manager in the QA environment for the Sales application group. Adding that queue manager to all three networks then allows you to filter your queue manager list by any or all of these. As you’ll see in a moment, you can search by these network names, but they are also used for choosing which queue managers are shown in the network display.

MO71 Location Dialog showing a group name and multiple network names.

Searching for queue managers

MO71 Main Window with the Search bar

There are a number of places in MO71 where you can search for queue managers in the list. First there is the main window. If the search bar is not visible at the top of the list, enable it from the View menu. In this search bar you can reduce the queue managers shown temporarily by typing in a search string which can be part of the queue manager name, the queue manager location, the group name, the network name or the client connection name.

MO71 will remember your last 20 searches, so after you’ve used them once you’ll be able to select them from the drop-down list.

The other place this is useful is on a multi-queue manager list dialog. Again, typing your search string temporarily reduces the queue managers shown, and you can use buttons to easily add those shown to the dialog with one click.

MO71 Multi-QMgr queue list dialog with search string

If you have a search string present in the main window when you open a list dialog, it’s search bar is initially populated with the same search string.

In both these locations you can explicitly search a specific field by qualifying your search string, for example adding “<net>” to indicate you only want to search network names.

Location Dialog Field

Qualifier

Qualifier Shortform

Queue Manager name

qm

m

Queue Manager Location

loc

l

Group Name

grp

g

Network Names

net

n

Client Connection Name

conn

c

When you use one of these qualifiers it should be specified between < and > characters.

So, don’t struggle with scrolling long lists of queue manager names, get your queue managers organised into groups and networks.

Most of these features have been in MO71 for a while, but the recent 9.0.1 release added the search bar to the multi-queue manager list dialog